Posted
by
BeauHDon Thursday October 12, 2017 @08:00AM
from the short-on-time dept.

Camel Pilot writes: Geologist have been aware of fresh magma moving in the Yellowstone's super volcano system. Previously this was thought to precede an eruption by thousands of years. Recent evidence by Hannah Shamloo, a graduate student at Arizona State University, demonstrates that perhaps the timeline from the underground basin filling to eruption is more on the scale of decades. A super volcano eruption has the power to alter life's story on this earth and even destroy all life on a continent. In light of this, it seems like a good time to invest some effort and resources into finding ways to prepare, delay or deflect the potential threat. The research was presented at the International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth's Interior (IAVCEI) 2017 conference in Portland, Oregon.

Seems like the thing to do to get recognition in the scientific community these days is to come up with catastrophic predictions. Between global warming, asteroids, Yellowstone, mass extinctions, blah blah blah the list just goes on and on. I really have tuned most of this noise out. It's just people looking to get their name out there on a story that will get eyeball traffic. It's kind of like a modern-day biblical doomsayer.

Two approaches come to mind, both of which are probably too massive to actually be undertaken. One is to cool the magma, by drilling a grid of holes and pumping water into them. (Use the heated water or steam for electric power plants.) The other is to break up the surface to a depth of several miles (underground nuclear bombs), so that any eruption will be just magma flows rather than an explosion.

Could either work? I don't even pretend to know. Would either attempt cause more problems than it solved? I wouldn't be surprised. At least some examination of possibilities should be done.

Two approaches come to mind, both of which are probably too massive to actually be undertaken. One is to cool the magma, by drilling a grid of holes and pumping water into them. (Use the heated water or steam for electric power plants.) The other is to break up the surface to a depth of several miles (underground nuclear bombs), so that any eruption will be just magma flows rather than an explosion.

Could either work? I don't even pretend to know. Would either attempt cause more problems than it solved? I wouldn't be surprised. At least some examination of possibilities should be done.

We are talking about Yellowstone, so consideration is needed as to how such preventative actions may affect the features which attract visitors.

We are talking about Yellowstone, so consideration is needed as to how such preventative actions may affect the features which attract visitors.

I certainly hope you forgot your </sarcasm> tag there, since given the choice between "Yellowstone is an uninhabitable crater" and "Yellowstone is the caldera of the supervolcano that destroyed humanity", I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the former option—the one where humans still exist—would be better for tourism.

Last I had heard, they were estimating that an eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano could result in 10 feet (i.e. 3 m) of ash being deposited in Houston. Even without considering the life-ending clouds that would cover the earth for decades, that much ash on the ground would be more than enough to end a civilization for the simple reasons that you wouldn't be able to breathe, move about, or work the land.

Now, for folks who aren't intimately familiar with US geography, this may sound like yet another tragedy for the people of Houston after the recent hurricane that ravaged the city, but that's missing the point entirely. The point here is that Houston is nowhere close to Yellowstone. Nowhere close.

To put it in perspective for any Europeans, the distance from Yellowstone to Houston (i.e. ~1300 miles or ~2100 km as the crow flies) is roughly the same as the distance from Amsterdam to Moscow (or London to Bucharest or Paris to Istanbul). Another way of putting it is that if an eruption of this magnitude happened in Munich, you'd have to travel to the Arctic Circle, the middle of the Sahara, or somewhere beyond Moscow before you'd see less ash than what I described. For any Aussies, it'd mean that if an eruption happened in Alice Springs, the entire country would be under that much ash or more. You'd have to get pretty far into Papua New Guinea or Indonesia before you'd see any less than I described.

All of which is to say, we're talking about life-ending amounts of ash being deposited across entire continents, so preventative measures may be necessary if we want there to be tourism, not just in Yellowstone, but anywhere on the planet.

Two approaches come to mind,... One is to cool the magma, by drilling a grid of holes and pumping water into them. (Use the heated water or steam for electric power plants.) The other is to break up the surface to a depth of several miles (underground nuclear bombs), so that any eruption will be just magma flows rather than an explosion....

Would either attempt cause more problems than it solved?

Both of those sound like things that are more likely to encourage, rather than prevent, an eruption. IMHO they'

The drilling plans I've seen is to come in at a very shallow angle. So shallow that the drills would actually start outside Yellowstone itself, intersecting with the magma chamber miles underground on its side. This is supposedly far less prone to cause destabilization risks..

They would be far far better than a cataclysmic eruption that sends dozens of cubic kilometers of dust and rock into the upper atmosphere wreaking fiery death on everything on the continent while blotting out the sun on the entire planet for decades leading to all plants to die and then anything bigger than a cockroach starving to death.

Yeah, I doubt all the nukes in the world would add up to a fart in a hurricane compared to a supervolcano. I think the idea with nukes is to break up the rock strata and let the magma burble out more slowly, rather than in one cataclysmic eruption.

I wonder if you might be on to something here. Not dropping a bunch of nukes into the thing and blowing it to hell and back. But instead using nuclear demolitions at key stress points to release pressure in a controlled way.

Well as controlled as we can possibly get it. Think of it as letting the air out of a tank using a safety valve instead of just waiting for the thing to blowup.

Might turn Yellowstone into a lake of magma but it would be better than losing the content. Of course it could also

What, exactly, are you going to do to prevent its eruption? Send it a strongly-worded letter?

The usual: tax increases, massive subsidies to companies creating innovative anti-volcano technologies and making big donations to the Democratic party, a massive increase in funding of anti-volcano research at universities, big payments to foreign nations potentially harmed by American volcanoes, increased immigration, and strong public condemnations of Republicans.

There really is no difference. The problem here is the belief that Nature owes our civilization something. Nature is neither benevolent nor malevolent toward us; it is indifferent to our fate.

Supervolcano eruptions are a fact. The study of the geologic record post-dates the emergence of our civilization, so it isn't surprising that the way our civilization operates doesn't take the possibility supervolcanoes into account.

GP's reaction is fairly typical of the "reasoning" of the benevolent nature school: a supervolcano eruption in the near future would be a threat to civilization, therefore we can discount that possibility. That reasoning applies across the board to anything like climate change or sea level rise. We're not prepared for it, therefore it can't happen..

It took 4.5 billion years for an intelligent species to emerge on the planet. In our species 300,000 year history, civilization is a novelty, barely 5,000 years old, the most recent 1.6% of our species' lifespan. Yet because 1000 years is a long time to us as individuals, we see civilization as something enduring and stable. There's no evidence to support that notion on a geologic timescale.

The geologic timescale is exactly why the odds are against an eruption in the next few decades. And with an eruption that massive, there are likely to be years of very clear and indisputable warning signs all over the region. I highly doubt a supervolcano eruption will catch civilization by surprise.

As a recent (by geologic scales) example, no one was surprised by Mt St Helens actually erupting. Everyone knew it was coming. Only the precise timing was unknown. And the way it erupted was surprising, of course. But at this point, scientists are pretty good at predicting impending eruptions. I just don't think predicting one decades out is anything more than speculation, considering that this is a pretty radical departure from conventional wisdom.

For extra-ordinary claims like this, you'll need fairly extraordinary evidence. And not to impune Ms. Shamloo, but this is a grad student we're talking about, not a professional volcanologist with decades of actual experience. As such, it's wise to consider the source of this theory in regards to its feasibility.

I remember Mt St. Helens very well, because I was working as a technician in the lab which sent seismometers there. It's an irrelevant example, because the Mt. St. Helens event is something that could be prepared for with a few weeks warning.

The larger scale the event, the longer you need to plan for it. A supervolcano can eject several thousand cubic kilometers of material. Mt St. Helens ejected 0.21 km^3. The last Yellowstone super-eruption was roughly twelve thousand time larger. If it happened today it would bury everything from California to Chicago in 10 feet of ash. It would effectively halt agriculture worldwide for several years. Given that the world's global food reserve is only adequate (if perfectly distributed) for 73 days, how many decades of planning do you think we'd need to be ready? How much of that time would be spent debating whether this was real, then debating on who was going to pay?

Also, I'm not sure you understand what "geologic timescale" means. The usual unit of time used is the Ma or Mega annum. Decades don't enter into it.

If your bar for "civilization" is "possesses any sort of permanent artificial shelter," sure. But I see that more as a precursor to civilization, which involves specialization and political organization. If the survivors of a catastrophic event were reduced to living in isolated huts with no political or economic organization above the immediate family group, I'd call that an end to civilization.

Asteroids, and a super volcano, do not seem to be due to human interaction, it is just a natural disaster that we will need to make sure we have a plan for dealing with. If we can't stop it, at least have an emergency infrastructure out there to move large scale of people.

Global Warming and Mass Extinction, are slow disasters which is why there are so many more deniers, first they are cause by us and our life styles (which people take exception too) and second there isn't a single simple cause and fix, it requires a long fix having a change in our culture and how we do things.

Some are also claiming that all of the vehicle and air traffic are setting up a resonance in the crust that is spurring volcanic reactions as evidenced by an uptick in eruptions over the last hundred years.

All fine and good, how do we test and measure this.Science is about facts, not just wild or educated guesses. After making such a guess or Hypothesis then you need to find a way to measure and collect data to see if such a Hypothesis is accurate.

That depends on what causes the mass extinction or global climate change. A large asteroid impact can cause a mass extinction and a global shift in temperatures on a very short timescale. Similarly, large volcanic eruptions can cool the climate very rapidly causing crops to fail etc.

This isn't genetic, but education. A lot of these areas which have people with deplorable values (what you consider deplorable is up to you) will often live with like minded people, so there isn't an equal spread of education of such ideas. If they live in an environment that accepts the idea of the educational elites conspiring to control the population, you will just not listen to this group of people. If you live in an environment where you see these educated elites and find for the most part they ar

The problem, is what would be considered a life style change? The problem isn't just stop doing one thing. But change how you approach your life and your life choices. It isn't about just using recycled napkins, but going with cloth ones, and washing them in bulk or not using them all together. It isn't about ditching your SUV for an electric car, but make sure your infrastructure is set for an electric car.

Most anthropogenic carbon emissions will naturally come to an end within a few decades as renewables become more efficient. Therfore we don't need to "change our culture"; it is our culture of free enterprise that is bringing about this change.

Yes to the first part. Maybe to the second. Yeah, right, to the third.

Development of renewables has benefitted from a lot of subsidies, publicly funded research, and other government programs. The leaders in renewables have leaned towards more government interventi

The public is supposed to give up their freedoms and money for a disaster that never comes.

You give up freedom and money for disasters that never come every single day, dude. The only difference is that these disasters affect the entire planet and every living thing on it. The real problem is that humans like you think you're entitled to the life of gluttony that you lead, like you somehow earned it.

We may not be able to beat this one, but we can prepare for this.Improving infrastructure to move people to the east coast. Having a backup supply of volcanic ash resistant air filters, and gas masks, to provide the public. Good relations with other countries as a way to deal with Refugees from America in case of such a disaster...

Insignificant. You are missing the point. A super volcano would cause massive climate change. Almost all current crops would die off in their new climate. All of California's crop would be covered in ash. You cannot feed massive populations without modern farms. That's just the beginning. The dinosaurs didn't die out due to getting hit by an asteroid. They died of starvation and climate change as a result of the asteroid. No moving of populations or mask filters would help that.

I am guessing you may be from Asia, Alaska or Hawaii. Because California is on the west coast. We need to move the population to the east coast. a Volcanic winter will destroy crops and there will be a food shortage. However there are crops that we could still grow. This would still be a life changing event, however there are things we can do to make sure our society survives and weathers this event, and some prep work we could save more lives.

Unless the jet stream reversed course, I believe people should move to the WEST coast. Ash and fallout will mainly head East, like it did when Mt. St. Helens blew. Western Washington for the most part was spared; Seattle and Tacoma completely untouched. Eastern Washngton got hammered. This jetstream is also why Yellowstone going is so bad - it will blanket our "breadbasket" midwest with ash. If the volcano was on the East coast, most of the fallout would end up in the Atlantic ocean, not on land...

No problem, we're not even using the farmland here in Canada to capacity for food grains. We're actually using less every year because of increasing yields on existing farmland. And unless something very screwy happens with the jetstream the prairies in central canada and the great lakes region wouldn't have any issues either.

Improving infrastructure to move people to the east coast. Having a backup supply of volcanic ash resistant air filters, and gas masks, to provide the public. Good relations with other countries as a way to deal with Refugees from America in case of such a disaster...

The problem will be far bigger than some dirt in the air and some refugees. A super volcano going off would cause massive and immediate global climate change. Temperatures globally would fall and crops would fail. Sunlight would be dimmed globally. Feeding people will become a huge problem far outside the US and Canada and a bigger problem in North America. We'd probably experience something akin to a nuclear winter for a time - even no

> US East coast would be "book of Eli", at best. US West coast will probably not exist.

> any human society larger than a small town on the planet will be a miracle

Not really. Most estimates I've seen show South Florida left relatively unscathed. By ashfall, at least. SoFla's main problem would be dealing with an almost-overnight influx of ~40 million new residents (path of least resistance for people fleeing the eruption from elsewhere... in the US, Florida is theoretically reachable even on foot with

Elon Musk just announced he has accelerated the Mars rocket program. We should be able to migrate to Mars well in time.

"Since we are starting ab-initio in a new planet", he said, "the entire planetary infrastructure will be built on sustainable resources from the ground up from the start from get go". Complete with Boring Machines taking all the roads underground, with some tunnels reserved for hyperloop, cars will drive themselves to charging stations, a Dyson Sphere of 2 Astronomical units in diameter will refocus sunlight on the Mars surface to maintain Earth like lighting and temperature.

He said "If Secretary General of UN would sign the contract, all this will be completed in 100 days or it would be free. "

It's hardly worthwhile to try to terraform Mars anyway, it's core is dead -no electromagnetic field. The solar wind would strip away whatever atmosphere we created.I don't see how we could generate a magnetic field that large artificially. I think I recall seeing a proposal but it seemed pretty pie in the sky.

The stripping rate is something like several dozen grams of atmospheric mass per second or something. You needn't worry that densified Martian atmosphere would go away overnight. It won't go away over ten millennia either.

It may be easier figuring out how to live on Mars with 50,000 people that have been screened and selected, which a totally different form of government (likely totalitarian), than living on Earth with billions of people.

Something tells me that if "screen and select" people to reseed civilization it would go terribly wrong. Remember, we all emerged from uneducated, toothless, hedonistic, grungy looking ancestors. Nature knows what it is doing.

It'd be neat to know within decade precision when a supervolcano would blow, but that's still a pretty big window for humans to deal with practically. Can you do much to prepare for something on that scale that may or may not happen in 20 years?

Based on the debris from the last two Yellowstone eruptions, over 80% of the continental US, most of unpopulated western Canada, and some of northern Mexico would experience significant ashfall. Weather patterns around the world would be disrupted for years. It would be a larger release of energy into the atmosphere than the most generous estimates of total animal activity since any records of human existence.

Much like most of the other doomsday scenarios, some areas would become uninhabitable, and everywhere else would need to adapt.

It'd be neat to know within decade precision when a supervolcano would blow, but that's still a pretty big window for humans to deal with practically. Can you do much to prepare for something on that scale that may or may not happen in 20 years?

I'm not certain that much can be done to prepare for it anyhow. There are enough unknowns to make most predictions just about worthless. Some speculate that Yellowstone is dying, and the hotspot that it lies over won't be an issue for a few million years, some think that while that may be true, there is still a caldera forming event to come as a grand finale for Yellowstone. I'd like to see more of the report before I give a semi-educated opinion. And they aren't making it easy to get.

I guess that's what I mean... if we know for sure that it is going to blow soon, but the error bar on it is measured in decades how do you get people to do anything useful in response? It is hard enough to get people to evacuate when a hurricane is bearing down. In a supervolcano situation we could perhaps tell them that they need to leave because maybe they will all die, or maybe it won't be until their grandchildren are adults that they get blasted to oblivion. They're just going to accuse The Man of t

This makes for an interesting read. However, there is no point in actually getting our panties in a bunch because there is nothing we can do to really stop Yellowstone from erupting. When it decides to go off, it's going to go off with a bang. Certainly there will be warnings but a volcanic explosion of this magnitude is an extinction level event. The eruption of Mt. St. Helens will look like the proverbial cherry bomb in a toilet by comparison. I guess I am not going to worry about what I do not have contr

From watching The Road I suppose we could stockpile edible insects that live well on dead and dried plant material. Or try to come up with novel ways to confuse future archaeologists, like building a stone henge in the bottom of Lake Erie.

The scientist said that within the human lifte time we might be able to see the effects of what leads to a supervolcano. Basically within decades we could start seeing signs of a supervolcano that might erupt in 100+ years. That's what the article says.

They are not saying it's a matter of decades from now when it will blow. It about how long it took for magma to move into the system until an eruption. The current study says decades, versus a previous study of another volcano that said millenniums.

There's still debate about about pinning down "the precise trigger of the last Yellowstone event."

When even Fox News reports that it may be directly and immediately profitable [foxnews.com] to prevent such a disaster then we have some hope as a species. After all the initial investment would be less than 0.5% of our military budget, it would make money by generating electricity, and the reality is Yellowstone has the potential to level America to smoking ruins with a far far far higher probability than some malnourished idiots with an assault rifle or two on the other side of the planet.

What would happen if "some nutjob" like in North Korea had one good missile and one good
nuclear bomb attached to it and lobbed it right into the middle of the Yellowstone caldera?
Would that possibly set it off or just make a mess? Or they could just throw a bomb in the
back of a cube van and drive right in there. Precarious times we live in.

perhaps the timeline from the underground basin filling to eruption is more on the scale of decades.

How long until the underground basin fills up?

If that is still thousands of years, who really cares?
But if it is due to be a year or two, I think all those "other continents" (where all life won't be destroyed) will start to re-think their immigration quotas.

Indeed. All federal funding for the National Science Foundation, which is the vast majority of all government investment in science research (outside of NASA which was 11.3B) is just 5.67 billion dollars for everything [nsf.gov]. That includes everything from researching Yellowstone to robotics to stem. The majority isn't even spent on hard sciences but rather integrating groups. We are talking grant money of maybe 100k here. Put that into perspective with 824 billion for the military [thebalance.com]. I'd say 0.000012% of our defense spending is very well spent on something that really could level most of America to smoking ruin, unlike some rag tag terrorists we helped create ourselves to have an excuse to wage wars that financially reward key players. Hell, I'd even up that to 0.001% and still call it financially sound.

I'm very pro-science. I'm just anti-mixing science and politics because politics turns everything to BS. And if you follow science at all, you can see that the current state of US science is plummeting down that slippery slope.

Yes, we're making volcanoes in the geological record in order to scam you out of your paycheck. But when an oil company chose to boost octane with tetraethyl lead because it was more profitable people like you didn't ask too many questions.